Although it’s made a name for itself recently among the PC crowd, Wargaming.net has been a game developer that’s been around for the past 15 years. A studio that originally worked on strategy games, the developer enjoyed a meteoric rise… Continue Reading →

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Although it's made a name for itself recently among the PC crowd, Wargaming.net has been a game developer that's been around for the past 15 years. A studio that originally worked on strategy games, the developer enjoyed a meteoric rise based on the success of World of Tanks.
The free-to-play MMO has caught on with 70 million players, and Wargaming.net is expanding with plans for World of Warships and World of Warplanes. The former is still in development but the latter is close to a release. The flying game been in beta for what seems like forever, but now, World of Warplanes is set to launch globally Nov. 12 and 13.
I had a chance to speak with Gareth Luke, Wargaming.net's senior producer, about the company's plans for the future at a recent San Francisco event. He offered details on World of Warplanes, World of Tanks on the Xbox 360 and how the company is going to eventually combine the trilogy of games.
A WIDE ARRAY OF PLANES: Even though it's in open beta, Luke says World of Warplanes has attracted 3 million players. It's a large but growing audience attracted to the game's style of dogfighting. It pits warfighters from Germany, USSR, the United States and Japan against each other. Each plane is customizeable and the game connects players so that they're evenly matched via tiers. Don't expect Korean War-era jets to shoot down World War I biplanes.
Luke says the 15 versus 15 combat is fast and as close to authentic as possibly while still making it playable for the masses. Players can change the paint, add new parts and mix and match weapons just as long as its historically accurate. The game even supports flight sticks and other peripherals. But the developer fudged on some aspects of flying, the team slowed the jets down from their real-life speeds so that they could be easily controlled. In another nod toward gameplay, the developer added a limited boost that's meant to get players out of trouble or help them in a dogfight.
With land already conquered by tanks, air set to be taken over in the fall, and naval battles in the works, will players expect to see all of them in one giant mash up? Although it seems that's what Wargaming.net is aiming for, it's not necessarily going to work that way.
COMBINING THE GAMES: Luke said that combining the MMOs so that planes would attack tanks and naval ships would shoot down jets would hurt the carefully crafted balance of each franchise. "We don't want to be Battlefield 4," he said. He outlined a metagame where generals fight over spots on the map and those spots are represented by in-game battles where tanks blast at tanks or battleships try to sink each other.
If those PC games weren't enough, Wargaming.net is also making headway into the console market. The company bought Day 1 Studios, makers of F.E.A.R. 3 and Fracture, and gave the team -- now named Wargaming West -- the task of building a World of Tanks from the ground up for the Xbox 360.
A FASTER VERSION ON CONSOLE: What players get is a faster experience than what they can find on the PC. Luke said it's a game that relies on new strategies based on the elevation of terrain, speed of the vehicles and layout of the map. Players can also expect the same sort of customization as the PC counterpart, and as always, World of Tanks is still free to play for Xbox Live gold members.
But if it's free to play, why not open up the game to Xbox Live silver members? Luke said initially the team wanted to do that. It gives World of Tanks a better chance at success with a wider user-base, but Microsoft persuaded the team to go the gold member route. He said it's something the developer had to learn as they shifted toward making a game for the console demographic.
Those hoping to see the game on other systems will have to wait. Wargaming.net has an exclusive deal with Microsoft for the World of Tanks, and besides, Luke said, the Xbox 360 has the biggest user base among this generation of consoles. Right now, World of Tanks for the system is in a closed beta and a release date is still up in the air.
Images courtesy of Wargaming.net
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